Deer Luhan, With Love

58

Make sure you've read chapter 57 first!

Chapter 58 – In Which I Don’t Go Home Yet Again

Deer Luhan,

I’m beginning to wonder if Kris ended up with his “maybe next time” through observing your inability to meet deadlines, because you’re quite spectacularly bad at it.

Leigh

Suho had kind of been right when he’d been having a go at the others about holing me up in the dorm and potential trauma.  It had been fine when there was at least one other person to keep me company, but after a mere ten minutes by myself, I was fidgety and sweaty and wanted to be anywhere but there.  The place felt stiflingly claustrophic without the others, and before long I was itching to leave.  Of course, I knew that I couldn’t go out of the building – I wouldn’t have dared to solo in any case, not after the previous day.  I settled for the helipad instead, because I felt that fresh air would do me good, but I found myself unable to step past the closet in the hallway.  Every time I so much as tried, my throat tightened and my mind seemed on the verge of shutting down with flashbacks of panic, so I retreated and decided it was best to find something to occupy myself with.

Obviously, I didn’t have the possibility of releasing tension through tumble runs, and I’d been doing enough of them earlier in the day for it probably not to be effective if I tried.  Cooking was out as the oven still hadn’t been fixed, so in the end I reluctantly settled for packing.

What actually happened was a massive procrastination on packing that involved tidying up pretty much the entire dorm.  And not just tidying up: it was like I’d gone into super-cleaner mode on steroids.  Within half an hour, Chen and Tao’s room was almost unrecognisable because you could actually move in it and see the floor (Tao had gone back to a floordrobe).  Twenty minutes after that, Kris’ side of his shared room with Xiumin was no longer a bombsite (I wasn’t sure how Xiumin put up with him, because his side was extremely neat).  I skirted Lay and Luhan’s (and my) room in favour of cleaning the kitchen, but eventually found myself in there anyway, because I remembered that Suho had basically been collecting anything that was lying around in the wrong place to stash in the corner by Lay’s bed.  Suho could be a bit of a hoarder.

Most of the things belonged in the living room, where I sensed D.O.’s hand had been at work, because it wasn’t quite as much of a tip as it had been in the morning.

I was just moving a maimed sofa cushion – which was the one thing out of the fifty-seven or so that I actually remembered Suho bringing into the room – back to its original home on the sofa when my phone rang.

Human distraction!  I threw myself onto the sofa, semi-destroyed cushion in my lap, and picked up without a second thought.

It was almost a mistake.

“Leigh!” exclaimed a very, very happy voice.  “I’m drunk!”

I didn’t know whether to sigh or laugh.  “I can tell.”

There was a crash from the other end of the phone, and then I heard Changmin slurring, “no, Gyu’un, ’m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine,” I put in.  Changmin just made some kind of bleating “meeeeeh!” noise that sounded a bit like a whining goat.  It was followed by a drawn out “heeeeey!” before a new voice came on air.

“Sorry!” said Kyuhyun.  “Minnie’s drunk!”

“So are you,” I pointed out, deciding that I was now amused.